Olympian, Mother Blake Russell Returns to the Marathon

At least twice a week, Blake Russell gets up at 5:15, turns on CNN and hops aboard her Bodyguard T460XC treadmill for 10 to 12 miles. Her husband, Jon, will have left for his job already, which is 90 miles away from their home in Pacific Grove, California. Russell keeps the volume on the TV turned down, so as not to wake the two little people still asleep under her roof. “Usually I read the CNN ticker and practice my lip reading,” she says.

It’s a far cry from where Russell, 39, was in 2008, when she made the U.S. Olympic team in the marathon and was the only American woman to finish in Beijing, in 27th place. At that time, she had a Reebok sponsorship and no children. Fitting in training was her only job, and it all happened outdoors.

But Russell was pregnant by the time she left Beijing—“Quin definitely walked in the closing ceremony,” she jokes of her son, now 5. Her daughter, Liv, arrived in March 2013. When she runs the New York City Marathon on Sunday, she will do so without a sponsor logo on her uniform.

Russell struggled after Quin’s birth. Despite some highlights, including a fourth-place finish at the USATF outdoor championships 10,000 meters in 2010 and making the U.S. cross country team that won the bronze at worlds in 2011, sleep deprivation hindered her training. She dropped out of the Boston Marathon in 2011 and the Olympic Trials Marathon in 2012.

“I felt like I was on the Murphy’s Law training program; anything that could go wrong did go wrong,” she says. “Being a first-time mom and factor in I couldn’t sleep the whole time I was pregnant, that’s basically two years of sleeping in three- or four-hour blocks if I was lucky. You can’t train off that. I think my body was just wrecked. Sometimes I’d show up for workouts and I’d say, ‘I can’t do this. I just have to go home and lie down.’”

After a track race in 2012 went poorly, she decided to pull the plug on her training and try for another baby. During her second pregnancy, she ran only a handful of times. “I turned into a house really early,” she says. “I got really big. It wasn’t fun to run with that much weight.”

But a curious thing happened after the birth of her daughter last year. Russell started going out for easy runs while her mother, Terrie Phillips, watched the baby. Then Russell tried adding in a few hill workouts, “just for fun, because that’s what crazy distance runners do,” she says. After a couple of months, she called her coach, Bob Sevene, and they tried a tempo run.

“It was head and shoulders above anything I did a year after having Quin,” she says. “After that tempo run, I said, ‘I’m running New York.’”

Her coach growled at her. “Can’t we just get fit first?”

During the course of the past year, Russell has steadily built up her training, and she has been running 100 miles per week for the past three to four months. She drops her son at kindergarten, and then her mother watches the baby during her hard workouts, which often take place on the roads in front of her mother’s house. Russell’s schedule with the kids means she doesn’t have the luxury of driving to different training locales.

It’s a set-up that seems to agree with her. In August, against a strong international field, she finished 10th at the Beach to Beacon 10K in 33:10, only 5 seconds behind Desiree Linden, who will also run New York. In September, Russell was third at the USA 20K championships in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1:10:38.

With the strains of London Bridge audible in the background, Russell explains she has high expectations for New York.

“It’s going well enough that I’m definitely thinking under 2:30, in the 2:28 to 2:30 range, which I think is a lofty goal on that course, since my PR is 2:29,” she says. “I think there’s a lot of American women in the same boat. And I’d be upset with myself if I wasn’t in that main pack.”

From Wednesday through race day, Russell will experience a rare luxury for a mom of young kids: a hotel room to herself. But a few hours after the race on Sunday, she’ll be at the airport, heading back to California. Because this marathon came with one admonition from her mother, who will have the bulk of the childcare duties during Russell’s absence: “You will come home on Sunday.”

Sarah Lorge ButlerSarah Lorge Butler is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World since 2005.

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